Concerts

Pianist Shiau-uen Ding and programmer Miller Puckette present a recreation of the first pieces written with the interactive programming language Max. Afterwards a special multimedia performance by Hideo Sekino Setsuhi Shiraishi.

12:00pm Open rehearsal with Shaiu-uen Ding and Miller Puckette on the challenges and rewards of working with interactive software

Seth Cluett is an artist whose work includes installation, concert music, performance, photography, and critical writing. His “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). The recipient of awards from Meet the Composer, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant his work has been presented internationally at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo, the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, STEIM, Apexart, and Eyebeam. He has published writings with Tacet Revue, Leonardo Music Journal, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and his creative work is documented on the Line Imprint and Errant Bodies Press as well as Sedimental and Winds Measure Recordings. In the fall of 2015 he joined the faculty of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken where he is jointly appointed in the programs in Visual Arts & Technology and Music & Technology.

A native of Taiwan, pianist Shiau-­uen Ding is an energetic performer of traditional and contemporary repertoire. She studied piano with Eugene Pridonoff, Elizabeth Pridonoff, and Lina Yeh, computer music with Mara Helmuth and Christopher Bailey, and contemporary improvisation with Alan Bern at National Taiwan Normal University and University of Cincinnati, where she received her doctoral degree. She lives in New York City.She has performed in France, Germany, Belgium, China, and throughout the US and Taiwan. Most recently, she premiered Christopher Bailey’s Empty Theatre, a quasi­-concerto for piano and orchestra, at SinusTon Festival in Germany. She was called a “daredevil” by The New York Times for her performance at Bang on a Can Marathon and “a powerful force on the new music scene” by Array for her recital at Spark Festival in Minneapolis. She directed and co-­founded NeXT Ens, the first chamber ensemble in the US performing solely electroacoustic music with national recognition. She has collaborated with internationally renowned performers and composers, including Steve Reich, Michael Kugel, George Tsontakis, who refers to her rendition of his Ghost Variations as a monster performance, and Moritz Eggert, who dedicated his Hämmerklavier XIX: Hymnen der Welt (Afghanistan bis Zimbabwe) to her. She has recorded for Capstone, Centaur, Innova, and New Focus.

Phil Edelstein is a founding member of Composers Inside Electronics (CIE) along with David Tudor, John Driscoll, and others. CIE evolved from collaborative group that met at New Music in Chocorua, NH. Ths is the genesis of the group’s RAINFOREST IV (1973), a performed electro-acoustical environment conceived by David Tudor and realized by the group. Other of Phil Edelstein’s performance group works include “At Once” and “Called Off”, “Riflessione di una diga” (with A. Bosshard & Koprod); solo works such as “Terrain” and “Episodes”; duets “Shrieks and Nuptials” (w/M.H. Harris), “Papermusic” (C. Black) and “Interfeed” (w/J. Driscoll).Other works include the self-running installation “Rainforest 5” at Mexico City‘s Laboratorio Arte Alameda (2009), Governors Island, NY (2011).Variation 2 was acquired by the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2015) and on recent loan to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Edition of 5 variations is currently represented by Broadway Gallery 1602 with recent announcement “MoMA Collects: David Tudor’s Rainforest V (Variation 1)”. Current activities include performances with the Stephen Petronio Dance Company’s realization of Merce Cunningham’s “RainForest”. Phil Edelstein’s studies included computer science, theatre, math, physics, electronic music with composer Joel Chadabe (SUNYA) and a teaching assistantship with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan.

Lauren Sarah Hayes is a musician and sound artist who builds and performs with hybrid analogue/digital instruments. She is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies within the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research explores new strategies for live electronic performance by investigating the performer’s physical relationship with the digital realm. Her music lies somewhere between free improv, experimental pop, techno, and noise. She also composes haptic music that can be experienced as vibration throughout the body, and enjoys performing in unusual locations. She has written about embodied music cognition, enactive approaches to digital instrument design, and haptic technologies (Contemporary Music Review, Organised Sound). She is a regular improviser, enjoying a wide range of collaborators, and for over a decade has given multisensory workshops for various groups, including those with sensory impairment, learning difficulties, and autism. Her person-centered approaches often result in custom built instruments designed specifically for a user. She is an associate of the New Radiophonic Workshop.

Christopher Howard is a percussionist who explores a wide range of musical styles with many different groups, including Iktus Percussion Group and the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players. He has a strong focus on electro-acoustic works, leading to performances at conferences such as the Percussive Arts Society International Conference, Machine Fantasies, Circuit Bridges, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the New York City Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit. He has played jazz and explored free improvisation with world-renowned trombonist Ray Anderson and others around the Long Island area. He has also performed, toured, and recorded with the award-winning Fountain City Brass Band multiple times in Europe. This varied background has made him a versatile musician interested in crossing the boundaries between these many different genres. Chris has a BM in Percussion Performance from the University of Missouri-Kansas City where he studied with Nick Petrella, and is currently working on his DMA at SUNY Stony Brook under Eduardo Leandro, where he also received his Master’s Degree.

Michelle Jaffé creates sculpture, sound and video installations, immersing people in an experience that transforms their sensory awareness. These participatory encounters create a moment where a synaptic shift in attitude is possible and new neural connections can be made. Her work has been exhibited at NYCEMF-Abrons Arts Center, the Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine, the Morlan Gallery at Transylvania University, KY, Bosi Contemporary, NY and UICA, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Additional solo exhibitions have been held at Wald & Po Kim Gallery, Susan Berko-Conde Gallery, Brooklyn College, Harvestworks Digital Media, and Broadway Gallery in NY, among others. Since 2008, Jaffé has been a fiscally sponsored artist of the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been awarded grants from New York State Council on the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, and has been the recipient of residencies at Brooklyn College Department of Computer Music, The Exchange Museum in England, the MacDowell Colony and Djerassi. Artworks are in private collections and 30 design works are in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fashion Institute of Technology and Museé de la Mode et du Costume in Paris.

Miller Puckette obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT (1980) and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard (1986). He was a member of MIT’s Media Lab from its inception until 1987, and then a researcher at IRCAM (l’Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Musique/Acoustique), founded by composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. At IRCAM he wrote Max, a widely used computer music software environment, released commercially by Opcode Systems in 1990 and now available from cycling74.com.Puckette joined the Music department of the University of California, San Diego in 1994, where he is now professor. From 2000 to 2011 he was Associate Director of Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD.He is currently developing Pure Data (“Pd”), an open­source real­time multimedia arts programming environment. Puckette has collaborated with many artists and musicians, including Philippe Manoury (whose Sonus ex Machina cycle was the first major work to use Max), Rand Steiger, Vibeke Sorensen, and Juliana Snapper. Since 2004 he has performed with the Convolution Brothers. In 2008 Puckette received the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award.

Izzi Ramkissoon is an award-winning electroacoustic multimedia composer, performer, and audio-visual artist.He has written works for a variety of media including theater, dance, installations, alternative controllers, and interactive multimedia.His compositions deal extensively with the use of technology in composition and have been featured at SEAMUS, NYCEMF, NIME, SPARK, LUMEN, Look and Listen Festival, Black Maria Film + Video Festival, World Maker Faire, MATA Festival, Italy, Norway, Greece, England, Mexico, and numerous other venues and festivals, both nationally and internationally.In his work he fuses media, technology, IDM, hardcore, classical, musique concrete and various other resources to perform interactive, improvisatory, and experimental works. Izzi has earned degrees from the College of Staten Island majoring in Electrical Engineering and Music, as well as a Master’s from NYU with a concentration in Music Technology.His research interest includes interactive multimedia, sensor networks, interface design, and music cognition.Currently, Izzi is serving on the New York Electro-Acoustic Music Festival Steering Committee, teaching 100-400 level undergraduate music technology courses in CUNY system as an adjunct professor, giving guest lectures and performances at various universities, performing with various electronic music groups as a solo artist and musician, and working as a professional audio-visual consultant.

For over 13 years, composer Troy Rogers‘ creative work has focused on the development and exploration of robotic musical instruments as generators of new musical possibilities. As a musical robot maker, he co-founded Expressive Machines Musical Instruments (EMMI), a group of composers dedicated to exploring and expanding the potential of robotic musical instruments. As a Fulbright scholar, he spent time at the Logos Foundation in Ghent, Belgium working with Godfried-Willem Raes and what is perhaps the world’s largest robot orchestra, where he developed a singing vocal robot, Stemmetje. Living the life of an early 21st century semi-nomadic robot herder, he resides in Duluth, MN when not touring the country in the RoboRig, a mobile platform for the development and dissemination of music for robots. He performs on streets and stages alike as Robot Rickshaw. Rogers is also a committed independent educator, regularly presenting lectures and offering Making Music with Robots and STEAM education workshops at universities, galleries, community art centers, makerspaces, and schools throughout the US.

Carla Scaletti is an experimental composer, designer of the Kyma sound design language and co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation. Her compositions, in the tradition of hard science fiction, begin with a “what-if” hypothesis and elaborate the entailments of that imaginary initial hypothesis.Educated at the University of Illinois (DMA, MCS), she studied composition with Salvatore Martirano, John Melby, Herbert Brün and Scott Wyatt and computer science with Ralph Johnson, one of the Design Patterns “Gang of Four.” Last year she was an invited lecturer at GVA Sessions — a workshop involving choreographers, filmmakers, and particle physicists from CERN — and presented a keynote address at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2015). She has been a guest lecturer at Centre de Crèation Musical Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) in Paris, and co-organizes the annual Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS), this year on the theme “Emergence,” at De Montfort University in Leicester UK. For more information: carlascaletti.com.

Hideo Sekino is an active performing artist on the Japanese Shakuhachi bamboo flute, especially in the Komuso (“Monk of emptiness”) style. He has been a permanent member of Komuso Kenkukai (a research organization on Komuso) since 1986. Since the 90s he has been involved in many collaborative works with performing artists from a range of fields, including dancers, painters, and musicians.

Setsuhi Shiraishi is a calligrapher and drew the design of the Enjin (“ring”) concept for the 2014 FIFA World Cup Japanese team jersey.She is active as a live performer; in 2014 she gave a calligraphic performance for the Commander-in-Chief of Defense Services of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar during his official visit to Japan and carried out a successful ten-part live performance tour throughout France.